I suppose it's just as well the Dutch invented gin, really,
because it helped to solve one of those little problems
that all colonial powers came across sooner or later
when they were running places like Java--
mosquitoes.
Speaking of which.
And mosquitoes mean malaria,
which might be why the Dutch
were also the world's greatest producers of this stuff, quinine,
grown, as it happens, here in Bandol.
And that's where the gin comes in,
because quinine tastes horrible and less so with a shot of gin,
which created another little problem--
running a colony drunk.
And they all were.
The guy who solved the problem for the Dutch
and for all the Western colonial empires
is a perfect example of what this program's all about:
how history is full of people with bright ideas.
I don't know if you've ever been to Switzerland
and done the tour here in Geneva,
but you've got to hand it to the Swiss.
It's clinically clean, this place, isn't it?
About as far from malarial swamps as you can get.
So it's ironic that it was here the quinine problem got solved
thanks to something that people have always done on the tour here,
like going to a famous Swiss jeweler's
and bankrupting yourself with an expensive present
for your significant other,
which is why, in the late 18th century,
a fellow here whose first name is Jacob
does so well at being a jeweler, he retires to the bar--
well, to experiment with carbonated water,
which is all the rage at the time,
and invents the solution to the foul taste of quinine
because he puts the quinine in sweet fizzy water, like this.
And you knew that because Jacob's second name was this.
Schweppes tonic was so successful,
there was no stopping it, literally,
because the trouble with effervescence is keeping it in.
They tried cork, tar, wire, paper, bits of string,
and nothing really worked
until a fellow in Baltimore in 1892
came up with something that did the job so well,
you don't even notice it when you handle it today.
This bright idea, the bottle cap, kept all the health-giving fizz in
and taught the modern world some very bad philosophy:
Use it and throw it away.
One of his employees took the concept a stage further
with one of the greatest throwaway bright ideas of all time
and changed the face of history because he changed the face of people.
His name was King Camp Gillette,
and thanks to the availability of really good steel,
his new throwaway razor blade made him a millionaire.
The steel, of course, was available thanks to somebody else's bright idea:
how to get steelmaking to take less than forever.
Here's the problem.
You take a whole day to produce molten iron,
which you will then pour into molds and let it cool for hours and hours.
Once this cast iron is cold, you stack it with charcoal in a box
and keep it incandescent for a week, and the charcoal seeps into the iron
and makes a thin layer of steel that you then hammer off.
Two things to say about that:
High-speed steel it ain't,
and the bits of steel that you hammer off are brittle,
and there isn't a container around
that will take the kind of heat you'd need
to remelt it all and fuse the stuff together.
And then along comes a clock maker called Huntsman
with a bright idea:
this, a special pot made of clay, and a top secret new ingredient.
This pot will take amazing heat and not melt down,
so you put bits of hammered-off steel in here,
heat it to unheard-of temperatures with a new wonder fuel called coke,
and in hours, you have Huntsman steel
that was going to be good enough for the kind of clock springs
desperately needed by certain travelers interested in time.
Here's why:
Time's the problem.
A 360-degree Earth turning once every 24 hours
means that the sun comes up one hour earlier
for every 15 degrees you go east
or later if you go the same distance west.
So if you know what time it is,
then you know how much different sunrise ought to be where you are.
This is highly critical for a navigator, because one degree is 60 miles,
and that's only four minutes in terms of time difference.
So in 1762, another clock maker called Harrison
comes up with a fantastically accurate new chronometer--
accurate because he solves the problem
of the way any metal spring expands or contracts
with all the different temperatures you go through
when you sail around the world.
Here's his little bright idea.
Say it gets hot in the Tropics
and your spring expands, say, that much,
so your clock is gonna run slow, right?
Not now.
Harrison puts onto the spring a little metal slider
that also expands exactly the amount
to shorten the spring back to where it should be
or do the opposite when it's cold.
So now a ship coming home could hit the spot within 500 yards.
Fantastic, eh?
Not fantastic enough,
because making a pinpoint-accurate landfall
was no good if you ended up a pinpoint-accurate shipwreck
because the lighthouse had fallen down,
which they used to until a really boring guy called Smeaton
tried using dovetailed stone blocks on a lighthouse,
and it never fell down again.
Smeaton also invented a diving bell, designed harbors,
and what else can I say?
Oh, in 1770, when Smeaton was in Scotland,
he met a man who ran an ironworks
and designed a water-powered boring machine for him.
Well, I said he was boring.
The boring machine bored cylinders for pistons for steam engines
and wasn't a patch on the upgrade that followed later.
And that Smeaton-- well, I did say, didn't I,
that the story of his life would cure your insomnia.
Speaking of which.
Meet John Wilkinson,
who had his bright ideas while he was asleep.
Keep your eye on the ball.
Here he is dreaming of a bright idea,
and here he is waking himself up to do something about it.
Ah, well, it takes all sorts.
The particular bright idea happening up there
is the one he had in 177 4 to upgrade the Smeaton borer
by rotating solid iron rolls against a steel-cutting head
and scooping out the center of the roll all the way through
to make incredibly precise cylinders
without which James Watt's steam engine would not have worked,
and the entire industrial revolution would not have happened.
Ah, he's gone back to sleep.
Wilkinson was the hottest iron maker there ever was--
built the first iron boat,
coined his own money,
invented rifling for rifles,
made all the iron pipes for the great Paris waterworks,
and had himself buried in a cast-iron coffin three times,
well before which: his greatest scam.
In spite of the fact that we Brits are at war with France,
Wilkinson manages to smuggle to Napoleon
the other thing you can make with a cylinder borer:
cannon barrels to fight wars all over Europe with.
Now, one of the things war creates is orphans,
which Napoleon's war did here in Stans, Switzerland,
where, in 1799, a middle-aged ex-farmer set up an orphanage for them
and changed the course of education for little kids all over the world.
His name was Pestalozzi, and his bright idea
was, to say the least, uncomplicated--
lots of music and games and exercise,
children teaching children,
no memorizing, no classes, no corporal punishment,
no textbooks,
but above all, no school.
This was education for Pestalozzi--
taking kids out of school
and getting them to learn from direct experience:
geography from maps of your nature walk.
Show kids a mountain, and then teach them to spell it.
Teach science from the way nature worked.
Above all, develop the kids' natural abilities to observe the world
and make sense of it in their own way,
have their own bright ideas.
The guy who turned Pestalozzi's little bright idea
into the kind of PhD dissertation material
that turns your brain to porridge was a German called Herbart,
who got all excited by the idea of Pestalozzi's little kids
getting direct experience from life.
Herbart reckoned that each new experience
was added to the ones you'd already had
and that as each new experience changed your total experience,
it changed you
but that you were only aware of the change
if something happened to make you aware,
something that caused the event
to cross your threshold of consciousness,
a concept Herbart invented and proceeded to measure,
thus turning psychology into the exact science it is today,
which is why I'm telling you this in the mysterious East--
because a guy who was at college with a friend of Herbart's brother,
was deeply into Eastern mysticism and went to s�ances
and wrote about the souls of flowers and suchlike,
and was called Fechner
took Herbart's ideas and turned them into what he called psychophysics,
which was all about measuring awareness.
If experiences like this dance, for instance,
changed you like Herbart said,
then at what stage in an experience
did you notice it happening to you?
At what stage did you become conscious of the effect on you?
If you know what I mean.
If you're still there.
So it was Fechner and his college pal
who came up with the next bright idea,
and amazing new scientific law
that I'd bet you've waited all your life to hear about--
the law of the just-noticeable difference.
And I kid you not.
This law would turn out to be of cosmic significance
once, that is, around 1860,
they'd got down to some really heavy research.
This kind of heavy.
The weight lifter is given more and more heavy weights to lift
and asked if he notices.
And I'm being perfectly serious.
Turns out, whether you notice the difference
with the extra weight
depends on the weight you started with.
And the scale of the difference is always the same.
If you double the basic, you have to double the extra.
So if for 100 kilograms, it was 2,
then for 200 kilograms, it's gonna have to be 4.
Okay, here's one for you, no muscles needed.
50 candles.
Add 1 .
Notice the difference?
You should.
That's the just-noticeable difference in light levels
the human eye can detect.
Between 50
and 51 candles.
which, as I said, was to become of cosmic significance.
Here we are on the equator-- north here, south here,
all marked obligingly here in Indonesia by this equatorial monument.
Now, I said that just-noticeable difference
would turn out to be of cosmic significance--
astronomical cosmic,
because here in the Southern Hemisphere
is where astronomers have always come
to look up at a sky much more full of stars
than here in the Northern Hemisphere.
One of these guys, called John Herschel,
comes south of the equator in 1834 to look at double stars
at night, of course,
and gets into the just-noticeable difference business
measuring the brightness of stars.
Now, back then, the official brightness
of the brightest star in the sky--
that is to say a star of first magnitude--
is said to be equal to the light from a plumber's candle
at one-mile distance.
Call it that.
Okay, now for Herschel's bright idea.
What you do is find another star much dimmer than the first.
Call it that.
Now, you use a lens to bring the dim star
close enough to the bright star
so that their brightness is exactly equal,
like this.
The distance you had to move the lens in order to do that
is the measure of how dim the dimmer star was.
Okay, here is where we get cosmic.
Turned out the different levels of stellar magnitude,
each magnitude marking the just-noticeable difference
between one star brightness and another,
meant that a star of fifth magnitude
was actually 100 times dimmer than a star of first magnitude.
And Fechner also worked out a formula
to relate brightness to how far away a star was.
Okay.
Now for the sky.
This is a star cloud in the Southern sky
in the Magellanic clouds,
and this is a double star.
Remember Herschel?
A dim star orbiting a bright one
and going bright, dim; bright, dim.
Now, from a distance, that could look like a single star varying.
Turns out there are single stars that vary called Cepheids,
and by 1920, they know
the faster the Cepheid varies, the brighter it is.
An astronomer called Hubble knows brightness relates to distance,
so when he finds Cepheids in the star cloud dim but varying fast,
he knows they're a long way away.
Now, he knows how far the star cloud is,
so he works out the Cepheid distance
and knocks everybody's cosmic socks off,
because his Cepheids are sitting out there
100 million light-years away,
the first sure indication of the incredible size of the universe.
So thanks to gin and tonic and bottle caps,
steel knives and clock springs,
lighthouses and cannon,
teaching kids, and weight lifters,
we know that as far as the cosmos is concerned,
we haven't remotely reached the end of it yet,
unlike this program.
Oh, why was I here in Java?
Well, this observatory was built to look for double stars,
and it was built using money from quinine, here in Bandol.
Good health.